w Jersey, in 1682.[126] An entry in Winthrop's
Journal, February 26, 1638, states that a "Mr. Peirce, in the Salem
ship, the _Desire_, returned from the West Indies after seven months.
He had been to Providence, and brought some cotton, and tobacco, and
_Negroes_, etc."[127] The twenty Negroes sold to the colonists at
Jamestown, 1619, were the first landed on the soil of Virginia and
possibly the first brought to the American colonies.[128]

There is evidence to show that the status of the Negro was at first
very closely affiliated with that of the white servant with whom the
colonists were thoroughly familiar and who stood half way between
freedom and complete subjection. It is probable, therefore, that both
Indian and Negro servitude preceded Indian and Negro slavery in all
the colonies,[129] though the transition to slavery as the normal
status of the Negro was very speedily made. The first and essential
feature in this transition was the lengthening of the period of
servitude from a limited time to the natural life. The slave differed
from the servant then not so much in the loss of liberty, civil and
political, as in the perpetual nature of that loss.[130]

There were several factors operating in the case of the Negro to fix
the status of the slave as his normal condition, the earliest and one
of the strongest of which was economic in character. Certainly the
influences which brought Negro slavery to the West-Indies and later to
the British colonies to the north were primarily economic. As a result
of her great commercial expansion in the first half of the fifteenth
century Spain had established a thriving slave trade with the west
coast of Africa. When it was discovered that the natives of the West
Indies, who had been enslaved to meet the labor demands of the new
world, were unable to do the work Spain began to import Negro slave
labor at the suggestion of Bishop Las Casas, thus turning the stream
of slave trade westward about the beginning of the sixteenth century.
By way of the English island colonies, the Bermudas and Barbados, the
slave trade extended northward to the American colonies, the first
slaves being brought from the West Indies to Virginia in 1619, so that
by the end of the seventeenth century the traffic had reached
proportions that frightened the colonists into taking measures for its
restriction.[131]

The fact that Negro slavery reached American soil by way of the West
Indies is not without s